Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Yale Center Scores With “Of Green Leaf…”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art entitled Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World. I pitched it because I think the whole category of artists’ books is too little known. But as it turned out, the exhibit isn’t strictly a show of artists’ books. It includes, as I write, “prints, drawings, collages, specimen books, field notes, cut-paper objects, photographs, video, sound and multimedia pieces as well as books—plus some 18th- and 19th-century microscopes” too. Some 300 of them, all told.

Of Green Leaf...They all, as the press release announced, look at ways “self-taught naturalists and artists recorded and observed the natural world around them from the sixteenth century to the present, examining the intersections of artistic and scientific interest.”

Here is my key conclusion:

“Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower” is instead an exuberant exploration of nature seen through the eyes of artists. A 1958 London Transport poster in the first gallery, portraying a boy, a girl and their dogs at the start of a country walk, embodies the show’s spirit: Casually dressed, they take the wide path through a forest to a blue-sky adventure. This is going to be fun.

And so it is, particularly in its first two-thirds.

After that, alas, the exhibition peters out a little, coming to something of an anticlimax. But it’s well worth viewing.

A couple of other tidbits:

  • The first half of the show’s title was taken from a poem published in a 1846 book called Twenty Lessons on British Mosses; Or First Steps to a Knowledge of that Beautiful Tribe of Plants, one of the best titles I’ve ever been amused by and so wonderfully British.
  • The catalogue was “designed to evoke an early naturalist’s field guide.” and it’s a charmer.

You can see more images here, including a Beetles Book, a Crow’s landscape and much more.

The Freer’s Whistler Connection Pays Off (Again)

800x442_The-Embankment1536LSYou art-lovers know that James McNeill Whistler did so much more than that portrait of his mother, but so many people do not. That’s why the exhibit at the Freer-Sackler* called An American in London: Whistler and the Thames,  is so necessary. It’s the first major exhibit of his works in the U.S. in about 20 years. Better yet, while I love his full-length portraits, which were on view in a special show at the Frick in 2008 along with etchings and pastels from his trip to Venice, the Freer show focuses on his moody, atmospheric river scenes. They were painted in the 1860s and ’70s, when Whistler began to title his works as “nocturns,” “arrangements,” and “symphonies.”

whistlere28094variations-in-violet-green-1871They are lovely, and I will cite Pink and Silver – Chelsea, the Embankment, at right, on loan from the Clark Art Institute; Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf, from the National Gallery of Art; Variations in Violet and Green: Chelsea, at left, from the Musee d’Orsay; and Nocturne, from the Art Institute of Chicago, as among my favorites.

The exhibit includes more than 80 works of art, including more than 20 paintings, and because the Freer owned many of the images, it created a video in-house as an experiment. Here’s the link to it. In it, among the other things I was reminded of is that Whistler suggested to Freer that he build his museum in Washington. It’s not as good, obviously, as seeing the exhibit, but it’s better than nothing if you can’t swing a trip to D.C. before Aug. 17.

Just for fun, you can compare that with the videos about the full-length portraits made by the Frick for its show in 2009 — available here.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Freer.

How Many Museums Is Too Many?

Some people would say there can never be too many museums. I would rephrase that to say there can never be too much art, but there can be too many museums. The U.S. may be there now.

IMLSlogoAccording to recently released information from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U.S. has twice the number of museums previously accounted for – 35,144 museums nationwide, up from an estimated 17,500 museums in the 1990s. The count is based primarily on IRS 990 forms filed by nonprofit museums, botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums and historical societies between 2009 and 2013, reports the AP. The 1990s method relied only on state museum association records.

Equally interesting and sometimes troubling is the distribution by state and by discipline. The vast number — 48% — are historic sites, societites and houses. Historical societies claim another 7.5%. General and “unclassified” museums are 33%. Art museums? Only 4.5%. I really doubt that all of those historic organizations are sustainable. You can see the chart here.

Geographic distribution is also skewed. In raw numbers, California has the most museums and Delaware the least, lower than Arkansas, North Dakota, Wyoming and Hawaii, which round out the bottom five. New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio round out the top five. See that chart here.

The map showing museums per 100,000 population shows some of the trouble: The most museum-dense states are Wyoming, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. The South and Southeast — where populations are growing fastest — are the least dense in museums.

Art museums can helps solve the problem with traveling exhibitions, partnerships and collection-sharing. But not those historical societies, for the most part. I think there will be closures in the coming years.

 

The Hidden News Behind The Saudi Museum Boom

The other day, The Art Newspaper reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has plans to spend “more than $1.7bn on building 230 new museums as part of a programme to promote the country’s culture.”

Mada'in Saleh…At a conference held in Oxford early in April, entitled “Green Arabia”, the influential HRH Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, nephew of King Abdullah and president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), said, “We have entered a new age; we have transitioned. Antiquities are the seat of a continuum to bring the life and history of Saudi Arabia closer to the hearts and minds of the people of the Kingdom—particularly the young.”

Building has already begun on 14 of the new museums, which will not only contain antiquities but the latest Saudi contemporary art….

But the real news, in my mind, came lower in the article: Saudi Arabia has completely reversed its stance on excavating in the peninsula. Previously, all sites dating before Mohammed, or about 610 AD, was scarce. “…little pre-Islamic research has been done in the country because of opposition from religious scholars, who claim it is ungodly,” the article said. “Now, however, clerics sit on the committee of the SCTA [Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities] advising on the new cultural programme.”

TAN said that about 30 archaeology teams from around the world have signed contracts with the Saudi government “to carry out research into the desert land and to uncover exhibits.” It continued:

…if we only research the history of Saudi Arabia post 610AD [the year in which Mohammed had his vision and began to preach] and say nothing about our history before then, we are belittling Islam, [HRH Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, nephew of King Abdullah, said]. 

“We believe our people were Bedouins and the caravans that went to Mecca 400 years before Islam led into the rituals of going on Hajj that still prevail today.”…

…Antiquities dating back 10,000 years or more demonstrate that Saudi Arabians stem from a line of wealthy tribes who transported frankincense and other precious materials to the north, west and east of the peninsula. “We are not, as many might think, nouveaux riches,” joked Prince Sultan. “Throughout history, Saudi Arabia has been at the crossroads of civilisations. People will be completely surprised and overwhelmed by the depth of civilisation of this country.”

This development, obviously to be applauded, reminds me of the traveling exhibition called Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and the History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was on view at the Freer-Sackler and other museums recently. I didn’t see it, but from afar it looked quite engaging, and I wonder if its reception around the world influences the Saudis.

One site, Mada’in Saleh (pictured here), is well-known, and dates back some 2,000 years.

As for the museum, well, the plan strikes me as excessive. By the most recent count, Saudi Arabia has about 30 million people. That’s one museum per 130,000 or so inhabitants. Saudi Arabia, so far, doesn’t get many tourists. I suppose the Kingdom can choose to support the museums, but I doubt they’ll have enough visitors to stand on their own.

 

 

The Now Partly Gone Folk Art Museum Is Far From Alone…

Grand-Central-Station-Untapped-Cities-Lost-Landmarks-NYC-Manhattan-Vintage-Photography-Architecture-DesignIt turns out that several New York City buildings, including some quite distinguished ones, had lives nearly as short as, and sometimes even shorter, than Billie Tsien and Tod Williams’s edifice on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. I walked past the site this weekend, now enclosed with a fence that blocks views of the dismantling, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art.

That American Folk Art Museum building lasted about 13 years. But there was an iteration of Grand Central Station (not Terminal, at the time), that lasted only three years (pictured). And a couple of mansions on Fifth Avenue that lasted 15 or 20 years. Plus a lovely, if overly ornamental Windsor Arcade, that stayed up about 10 years before succumbing to a fire and a new idea for the site on Fifth Avenue and 47th St.

I learned all this in an interesting post on something called Untapped Cities — NYC’s Shortest-Lived Buildings. Have a look. It adds a little perspective to the current demolition.